Advent: The Kings, the Conflict, and the Promise

Ryan: 00:00:12

Welcome back to Ryan and Brian's Bible Bistro.

Ryan: 00:00:13

I'm Ryan.

Brian: 00:00:14

And I'm Brian, and this is a podcast.

Brian: 00:00:16

Oh, sorry.

Ryan: 00:00:17

This is the Bible Bistro and it is a podcast.

Ryan: 00:00:20

You're right.

Ryan: 00:00:21

What's it about, Brian, since you've.

Ryan: 00:00:22

You're just jumping the gun?

Brian: 00:00:23

Theology and all things related to the Christian faith.

Ryan: 00:00:25

That's right.

Brian: 00:00:26

Welcome back.

Ryan: 00:00:27

Thank you.

Brian: 00:00:27

It's already a short week.

Ryan: 00:00:29

Yeah, it's finished.

Brian: 00:00:30

Yeah.

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This is a Thursday drop for everybody.

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A little bonus here.

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A little bonus.

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Bonus to make up for our absence in the past.

Ryan: 00:00:38

Yeah.

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Our presence in the present.

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The ghost of Christmas past.

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I don't know.

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I'm trying to.

Ryan: 00:00:46

Now.

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I don't know.

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You're getting a little metaphysical for me here.

Brian: 00:00:50

So all we do is metaphysics.

Ryan: 00:00:53

I know.

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I'm just teasing.

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Gosh.

Ryan: 00:00:55

Okay, here we go.

Brian: 00:00:56

Well, we're back.

Brian: 00:00:57

I'm certainly not gonna do a physics podcast.

Ryan: 00:01:01

That's the truth.

Brian: 00:01:01

Can you imagine that?

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The only thing I know about is inertia.

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It's hard to get in motion and hard to stop.

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So anyway, we're back.

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This is Advent Week 2, and we're continuing our look at Matthew.

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Yeah.

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Matthew chapter.

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Well, the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew.

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Let's be frank.

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We're not looking at the whole Gospel of Matthew.

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Okay, let us be frank.

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Let us.

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So what I want to do is I want to begin.

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So this is the second section.

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We talked last week about the fact that Matthew breaks his genealogy of Jesus into three sections, even 14 generations each.

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But what we have here is we're getting into some names that are a little bit less familiar.

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Next week, if you think these names are unfamiliar, just wait till next week.

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But I want to begin where we left off.

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Read the first part of verse six here.

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Well, I will.

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And Jesse, the father of King David, is where I want to begin today.

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Now, we're going to hear a whole lot of Kings names over the next few minutes.

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We're going to hear.

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If you look at this section of genealogy, from verse 6 down through verse 11, it is almost all Kings names.

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But the interesting thing, one of these little details, I told you in genealogy, is to pay attention.

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Attention to David is the only one who's given this title.

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He's the only one who's called King.

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And I think that's important.

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I said last week, both Rahab and Ruth were ancestors of this king, who is the greatest king in Israel's history.

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So when people looked back at Israel's golden age, they looked back at David and I think there's a very good reason for that.

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Look over in 2 Samuel chapter 7 for me, if you would, and go ahead and read the first two verses of this chapter.

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I think these two verses.

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How do I set this up?

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These two verses are saying it's again, something we could pass over very quickly.

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But I think these two verses are saying something very important leading up to later in this chapter.

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What I think is one of the most important yet neglected prophecies in the Old Testament.

Ryan: 00:03:10

Wow.

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How can I set that up any better than that?

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After the king was settled in his palace and the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies around him, he said to Nathan the prophet, here I am living in a house of cedar while the ark of God remains in a tent.

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So the king that's in view here is David, right?

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So David was settled in his palace.

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And I want you to notice that line, the second line that you read there.

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The Lord had given him rest from all of his enemies around him.

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I think this marks a very important stage in the history of Israel because Israel had not been at peace to this time, right?

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There had been conflict.

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They into a nation really under captivity in Egypt, they had, through the Exodus, God had led them, through Moses, out into the wilderness.

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They had experienced 40 years of wilderness wandering.

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You read the Book of Joshua, and it's all about warfare, right?

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It's all about battle of Jericho, the battle of AI, all of these various places, even in their way up to there, the various nations that tried to stop them or tried to get in their way.

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The Book of Judges, we had, you know, really good explanation of that given to us our names completely slipped my mind now by Michelle Knight.

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Michelle Knight, Dr.

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Knight.

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Very good explanation about how the judges are, period, where it talks about the leaders of Israel not, you know, living up to what they were supposed to.

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And over and over again, you find that they fail and the people are left in turmoil.

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Various nations come in and oppress them.

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Things are not the way that they're supposed to be.

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Even the very first part of the books of 1 Samuel, the very first king of Israel, Saul, as much as he was about military might and as much as he tried to bring peace, it ended up in warfare.

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It ended up in actually him and Jonathan both dying in battle, right?

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And essentially committing suicide as they were surrounded.

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And so it's not until we get to this point that we find any talk of the idea that the enemies had been defeated and God had given David rest.

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And it's at this point that David, then that gives him the space, if you will.

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He's not constantly trying to conquer the Philistines and other surrounding enemies.

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That gives him the space to begin to think about the idea of a permanent place of worship.

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He says, look, I'm living in my house now.

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I have the palace.

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Why is God's Ark of the Covenant still in a tent?

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Why is it still in the tabernacle?

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Shouldn't we have a permanent place of worship?

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And so he conceives the idea of a temple.

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And Nathan initially says, well, God's not kept you from doing anything else that you wanted to do.

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You should go ahead and plan on doing that.

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But then we find later in this chapter, this prophecy where God says to David, you're not going to be the one who's going to build me this temple.

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It's going to be one who comes after you.

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But then he gives him an important promise.

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And this is about halfway through verse 11, down in chapter seven, I think.

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And we've talked about this one before.

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I know, but it is.

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It is a very important prophecy.

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Here it says, nathan, the prophet.

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God speaks through Nathan the prophet.

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The Lord declares to you that the Lord himself will establish a house for you.

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In other words, you're not going to build a house for me.

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I'm going to build a house for you.

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When your days are over and you rest with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, your own flesh and blood, and I will establish his kingdom.

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He is the one who will build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.

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Now, the first part of this, obviously, is talking about Solomon, right, that he's going to build the temple.

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But then we get this language about a forever kind of kingdom that's going to be established.

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And as we look on, we get kind of this idea, okay, there's going to be this very important dynasty, this house that comes from the lineage of David.

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But there's also something God is doing here that.

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That we can't quite get ahold of.

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If you're looking at it from Nathan's perspective, probably David's perspective, it goes on.

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It says, I will be his father.

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God himself will be his father, and he will be my son.

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When he does wrong, I will punish him with a rod wielded by men, with floggings inflicted by human hands, and I'll stop there.

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I know a lot of people really struggle with this idea.

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I think what we're looking at is we're going to see this as we look at the descendants of David, when David's descendants don't do what they're supposed to do, they're going to receive punishment and the nation is going to suffer for it.

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When they do right, then God blesses them.

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But there's this sense that they're going to receive punishment.

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Well, and I'll stop there for right now.

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But my love, this is verse 15.

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But my love will never be taken away from him as I took it away from Saul.

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In other words, David's line, even when they do wrong, God is going to continue to work through this family.

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The same way he gave a promise to Abraham, he now is saying to David, it's from your line that I'm going to do this next thing that I'm going to do.

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My love will never be taken away from him as it was taken away from Saul, whom I removed from before you.

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Your house, David, your kingdom will endure forever before me and your throne will be established forever.

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So now we're getting talking about metaphysics right now we're getting into some really kind of interesting forever kind of language.

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So I think there's two things going on side by side here.

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We're talking about the line of David, but we're also talking about God's promised king, the Messiah, who is going to be establishing this forever kind of kingdom.

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So God gave Israel peace under David's rule.

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And by the way, the second week of Advent, the second Sunday of Advent is all about peace.

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That's the message that the angels brought, right?

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Peace on earth, goodwill to men.

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It's the message that the people saw.

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Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist said, you've come to basically raise up for us a horn of salvation in the house of David and you're going to give us victory over our enemies.

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In other words, you're going to bring a time of peace.

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People looked at the time of the Messiah as ushering in this age of peace, like what David did, right?

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But the interesting thing about this peace that we see in chapter seven, verses one and two, God gave David rest from all of his enemies around him.

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It was very short lived.

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And that's what we see in the rest of this genealogy.

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So in the last half of verse six, go ahead and read that.

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Well, I was going to read that, wasn't I?

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In the last half of verse six of Matthew chapter one, we actually do kind of a little bit playing these things ahead of time.

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We find the fourth woman mentioned in Jesus genealogy.

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But I'm going to remind you how I said this last week.

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I said there are five women who are mentioned and four of them are mentioned by name.

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This one is not mentioned by name.

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I want you to notice the way that this is said.

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This is Matthew, chapter one, the last half of verse six.

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David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah's wife.

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Now, that's an interesting way to say Bathsheba, right?

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You said Bathsheba last week.

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But that's not Bathsheba's name, is not here.

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It's the one who'd been Uriah's wife.

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And even in that statement, I think we get a little bit of an image of what's going on here in this section because we know that even though David had been given peace, the problem is that he did not act well in that period.

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Even when he set his army off to deal with some war, he stayed at home.

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He ended up committing adultery with Bathsheba while Uriah the Hittite was on the battlefield.

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Notice again, it was a Hittite here, a foreign man who was a part of this lineage.

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Uriah the Hittite then was murdered.

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David killed him, surely as he'd struck the blow himself.

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He killed Uriah the Hittite and was therefore guilty of murder and adultery.

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And then it was exacerbated by his murdering him.

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And that led to the end of David's rule.

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Even the beginning of his rule started with peace.

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The end of David's rule ended up being one of division and conflict.

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So Solomon, let's talk about that a little bit.

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That's interesting, because if you read the end of the book of 2 Samuel, there's lots of palace intrigue.

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In fact, they made these movies, they made TV series about this, set in modern times.

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But it's such an intriguing story.

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The child, the son that was born to Bathsheba first, of course, died soon after childbirth.

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David pleaded for his life, but the child died.

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But then Bathsheba conceived again and gave birth to a son by the name of Solomon.

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And David promised Bathsheba that Solomon would succeed him as king, not the older sons that he had that had been born from Saul's line.

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But it was through Uriah's wife, Uriah's wife, that the lineage was going to be done.

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And so he promised that to solve.

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And of course, that didn't set well with Absalom.

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And Absalom tried to seize the throne by military force and ended up dying as a result of it.

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So David's old age, he sees his family broken apart.

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He finds his own sorrow.

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You remember, he cried out, absalom, Absalom.

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O my son, my son.

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The river above the gate know that I would have died instead of you.

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And so the enemies around then see this as a sign of weakness of David.

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This.

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This inner turmoil and division is going on.

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And the enemies on the outside use that as an excuse to press in.

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David's old men don't trust him the way that they had at one time.

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And so the end of David's rule does not end in peace.

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If we go on, then look at Matthew 1:7.

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So Solomon again, he's the son of Bathsheba and David, Solomon the father of Rehoboam, Rehoboam the son of Abjah, Abijah the son of Asa.

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So Solomon, we really like him.

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We like the stories about his wisdom and so forth.

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But he did not do well.

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He was the one who realized the building of the temple what David had conceived.

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The building of the temple, Solomon realized.

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But he also did so in an oppressive way.

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He demanded taxes from the people.

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He demanded people who would work on this.

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And it ended up in a division of the kingdom.

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Read 1 Kings 11.

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Because the other thing we always talk about is Solomon's wives and his concubines.

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But there's something else going on with that part of it too.

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You got 1 Kings 11, I think.

Ryan: 00:14:40

King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh's daughter.

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Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites.

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They were from nations about which the Lord had told the Israelites, you must not intermarry with them because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.

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Nevertheless, Solomon held fast to them in love.

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He had 700 wives of royal birth and 300 concubines.

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And his wives led him astray.

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As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods.

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And his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God, as the heart of David, his father had been.

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He followed Asherah, the goddess of Sidonians, and Moloch, the detestable God of the Ammonites.

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So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord, and he did not follow the Lord completely, as David, his father, had done.

Ryan: 00:15:28

On a hill east of Jerusalem, Solomon built a high place for Chemosh, the detestable God of Moab, and for Moloch, the detestable God of the Ammonites.

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He did the same for all his foreign wives who burned incense and offered sacrifices to their gods.

Ryan: 00:15:41

The Lord became angry with Solomon because his heart had turned away from The Lord, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice.

Ryan: 00:15:48

Although he had forbidden Solomon to follow other gods, Solomon did not keep the Lord's commands.

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So the Lord said to Solomon, since this is your attitude, you have not kept my covenant and my decrees which I commanded you.

Ryan: 00:16:00

I will most certainly tear the kingdom away from you and give it to one of your subordinates.

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Nevertheless, for the sake of David, your father, I will not do it.

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During your lifetime I will tear it out of the hand of your son.

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Yet I will not tear the whole kingdom from him.

Ryan: 00:16:13

Will give him one tribe for the sake of David, my servant, and for the sake of Jerusalem, which I have chosen.

Brian: 00:16:18

So this is foreshadowing of what we see in Rehoboam.

Brian: 00:16:22

It's under Rehoboam that that division takes place and the kingdom of Israel is never united again.

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Now think about that.

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David is the one who brought peace to this land, and his grandson is the one under whom we find it ripped asunder.

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His own son, Solomon does not follow in God's ways, and Rehoboam follows in the ways of Solomon.

Brian: 00:16:42

Abijah, who comes after him, experienced war during his period of time.

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And in fact, flip over to you have one Kings there.

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Just read verse six there for me.

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This is Abijah's, the description of his reign here.

Ryan: 00:16:59

There was war between Abijah and Jeroboam throughout Abijah's lifetime.

Brian: 00:17:03

So conflict.

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So the peace that David had enjoyed was very short lived.

Brian: 00:17:09

Asa his son did some better.

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And we see that as we look through this line, there are some who do better than others, but they're usually very short lived periods of time.

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And then those who come after them tend to undo whatever they had done previously.

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So this is verse eight.

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Asa, the father of Jehoshaphat.

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Jehoshaphat the father of Jehoram.

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Jehoram the father of Uzziah.

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I'll say Jehoshaphat was one who prayed for God's deliverance, but it was in a battle, in other words, they were getting ready to go into warfare.

Brian: 00:17:41

And Jehoshaphat then sought the Lord's favorite in that Jehoram did well.

Brian: 00:17:47

But then Uzziah we find, interestingly enough, 52 years is how long Uzziah reigned in Israel.

Brian: 00:17:55

And he did a lot to build up the nation militarily, build up the.

Ryan: 00:18:00

Towers and stuff like that.

Brian: 00:18:01

Exactly.

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But at the same time he tried to take on the role of a priest.

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And because of that pride, God struck him with leprosy.

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And so the end of his reign he spent locked away inside of a house.

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So there's.

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There's the example of Uzziah.

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And then it goes on, verse 9.

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Uzziah the Father of Jotham, Jotham the father of Ahaz.

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Ahaz was not a good king.

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He did evil in God's eyes.

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But then Ahaz was the father of Hezekiah.

Brian: 00:18:32

Ahaz had continued with the worship of false gods, continued with bringing in these high places again all the way back to Solomon.

Brian: 00:18:40

We see this being an issue, right?

Brian: 00:18:42

These foreign women, these outlandish is the way that they're described in the King James Version.

Brian: 00:18:49

There's this war, this conflict going on, not just the enemies, right, but between kings who are trying to be faithful to God and they're compared to their father David, right?

Brian: 00:19:03

And then those who are instead worshiping a number of gods or bowing down to various idols and they're said to be not like their father David.

Brian: 00:19:13

But all of this comes back to then why we call the Messiah then because of that promise God made to David, that you'll never fail to have a person on the throne that we call Christ the son of David.

Brian: 00:19:26

That's who we're looking forward to, right?

Brian: 00:19:28

We're looking forward to a peace that's going to endure.

Brian: 00:19:33

Not one that's just going to be momentary, not just one that's going to last during the lifetime of a good ruler.

Brian: 00:19:39

So that leads us to a problem, because there's two issues.

Brian: 00:19:44

The way I'll say it is that God's peace can never come about through a human ruler.

Brian: 00:19:52

Whether they're militarily powerful, if that's the means by which they try to bring peace, whether they're politically savvy and try to do it through political intrigue.

Brian: 00:20:01

At the end of the day, their reigns are going to come to an end.

Brian: 00:20:05

It doesn't matter how long they are.

Brian: 00:20:08

Hezekiah is another good example.

Brian: 00:20:09

Hezekiah was a great king.

Brian: 00:20:11

It says he did away with all the high places.

Brian: 00:20:14

He brought revival to the land.

Brian: 00:20:16

You might remember, though, even during his reign, this is when the Assyrians come and they surround Jerusalem.

Ryan: 00:20:22

You remember that this is when Isaiah is prophesying.

Brian: 00:20:24

Exactly.

Brian: 00:20:24

So it is that period of time.

Brian: 00:20:26

You have the prophet Isaiah and we have them being threatened by the Assyrians.

Brian: 00:20:33

And yet Hezekiah goes to God, goes to that temple that David had conceived and Solomon had built.

Brian: 00:20:38

He goes to that temple and he prays to God for deliverance.

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And God miraculously delivers them.

Brian: 00:20:44

You might remember the Assyrian angel, an angel at night.

Brian: 00:20:47

They die in their sleep, right?

Brian: 00:20:49

And so God delivers Hezekiah.

Brian: 00:20:52

But here's the great king, right?

Brian: 00:20:54

Leading the people in the way that God wanted.

Brian: 00:20:57

But here's what I want you to see.

Brian: 00:20:58

Because back In Matthew, chapter one, Hezekiah was the father of Manasseh.

Brian: 00:21:06

Look at 2 Kings 21.

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And this is quite a lengthy thing, but this is a summary of the reign of Manasseh.

Brian: 00:21:22

Go ahead and read, if you will, starting in verse one.

Ryan: 00:21:25

You want to read the whole thing?

Brian: 00:21:27

Not the whole thing.

Brian: 00:21:28

I'm trying to.

Brian: 00:21:28

Look.

Brian: 00:21:28

I can't get to it quickly enough.

Brian: 00:21:30

Go ahead and start reading.

Brian: 00:21:31

I'll tell you when to stop.

Brian: 00:21:32

How's that?

Ryan: 00:21:32

Manasseh was 12 years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem 55 years.

Ryan: 00:21:37

His mother was Hephzibah.

Ryan: 00:21:41

Hephzibah, of course.

Ryan: 00:21:42

How could I miss that?

Ryan: 00:21:43

He did evil in the eyes of the Lord.

Ryan: 00:21:45

Following the detestable practice of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites.

Ryan: 00:21:49

He rebuilt the high places that his father Hezekiah had destroyed.

Ryan: 00:21:53

He also erected altars to BAAL and made an Asherah pol, as Ahab, king of Israel had done.

Ryan: 00:21:59

He bowed down to all the starry hosts and worshiped him.

Ryan: 00:22:02

He built altars in the temple of the Lord of which the Lord had said, in Jerusalem, I will put my name.

Ryan: 00:22:07

In the two courts of the temple of the Lord.

Ryan: 00:22:09

He built altars to all the starry hosts.

Ryan: 00:22:12

He sacrificed his own son in the fire, practiced divination, sought omens and consulted mediums and spiritists.

Ryan: 00:22:19

He did much evil in the eyes of the Lord, arousing his anger.

Ryan: 00:22:22

He took the carved Asherah pol he had and put it in the temple of which the Lord had said to David and to his son Solomon.

Ryan: 00:22:29

In this temple and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I will put my name forever.

Ryan: 00:22:35

I will not again make the feet of the Israelites wander from the land I gave their ancestors.

Ryan: 00:22:40

If only they will be careful to do everything I commanded them and will keep the whole law that my servant Moses gave them.

Brian: 00:22:46

Okay, let's stop for a moment.

Brian: 00:22:47

I'm gonna.

Brian: 00:22:47

I'm gonna have you continue here in just a minute, but I want you to think about this, because there's a couple things that are going on.

Brian: 00:22:51

We kept talking about the temple, right?

Brian: 00:22:52

David conceived it, Solomon built it.

Brian: 00:22:54

That God said, this is where I'm gonna put my name forever, and I'm never gonna make my people wander again.

Brian: 00:22:58

This is where I want them to stay.

Brian: 00:23:01

Manasseh takes and he erects a detestable foreign idol in the middle of that temple, right?

Brian: 00:23:10

He desecrates the temple to God.

Brian: 00:23:13

And that's where this last part, this last verse he read becomes very important.

Brian: 00:23:17

I will not make the feet of the Israelites wander, if only they will be careful to do everything I've commanded them.

Brian: 00:23:24

So it's a conditional promise in this.

Brian: 00:23:26

Now, God's promise is going to be accomplished.

Brian: 00:23:29

God's plan is going to be accomplished, but it's conditional in the sense of are they going to be able to enjoy the blessings of God in the midst of his plan being fulfilled or not?

Brian: 00:23:41

Are they on board with God's plan or not?

Brian: 00:23:44

And that doesn't mean that they automatically have kind of an out.

Brian: 00:23:48

Go ahead and read this.

Brian: 00:23:48

This is the last part, starting verse nine.

Ryan: 00:23:51

Yeah.

Ryan: 00:23:53

But the people did not listen.

Ryan: 00:23:55

Manasseh led them astray so that they did more evil than the nations the Lord had destroyed before the Israelites.

Ryan: 00:24:01

The Lord said through his servants, the prophets, Manasseh, King of Judah, has committed these detestable sins.

Ryan: 00:24:07

He has done more evil than the Amorites who preceded him and has led Judah into sin with his idols.

Ryan: 00:24:12

Therefore, this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says.

Ryan: 00:24:15

I'm going to bring such disaster on Jerusalem and Judah that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.

Ryan: 00:24:22

I will stretch out over Jerusalem the measuring line against Samaria and the plumb line against line used against the house of Ahab.

Ryan: 00:24:30

I will wipe out Jerusalem as one wipes the dish, wiping it and turning it upside down, I will forsake.

Brian: 00:24:36

You can go ahead and stop there.

Brian: 00:24:37

I think you get the idea.

Ryan: 00:24:40

It doesn't sound like it's a good time.

Brian: 00:24:41

No.

Brian: 00:24:42

So what do you notice there?

Brian: 00:24:43

There's a couple of things that I think are very important.

Brian: 00:24:45

What.

Brian: 00:24:45

What comes to your mind when you read that?

Ryan: 00:24:47

Well, they're worse than the people that they driven out.

Brian: 00:24:50

That's the thing.

Brian: 00:24:51

So why did God choose this family?

Brian: 00:24:54

They were going to be the people who were going to bless the whole world, Right?

Ryan: 00:24:57

And they ended up being just not.

Brian: 00:25:00

Even as bad as worse than the people that God had driven out before them.

Brian: 00:25:05

Do you get the issue here?

Brian: 00:25:06

And so that's part of the issue.

Brian: 00:25:09

That's part of the problem that's going on.

Brian: 00:25:11

I think that's very good to notice that.

Brian: 00:25:12

You notice anything else here in these terms, then.

Ryan: 00:25:19

You know, the king led the people into like it was his work and that it, you know, it's going to be Destructive.

Ryan: 00:25:29

I mean, there's a judgment for this.

Brian: 00:25:30

God says, I'm going to bring judgment, and it's going to be the kind that people are not even going to be able to believe.

Brian: 00:25:36

So let's go ahead back to Matthew chapter one and see what's going on here.

Ryan: 00:25:40

Then let's get back to Advent, huh?

Brian: 00:25:42

Shall we?

Brian: 00:25:44

What?

Brian: 00:25:44

You're not feeling very Christmas.

Brian: 00:25:45

You're not feeling Christmas spirit?

Ryan: 00:25:47

Well, just the whole destruction.

Ryan: 00:25:48

I'm going to wipe you like a plate.

Ryan: 00:25:50

Doesn't.

Brian: 00:25:50

There was one more thing I wanted to say about this because you notice how Manasseh undid everything his father Hezekiah had done.

Brian: 00:25:57

So Hezekiah comes in, he wipes out all these high places, and Manasseh just puts them back in place and does even worse.

Ryan: 00:26:03

Yeah, I guess one of the things that I always question with that, the kids, what's going on, who's around him.

Ryan: 00:26:09

He's 12 years old.

Brian: 00:26:10

Right, right.

Ryan: 00:26:12

Like, what's going on here?

Brian: 00:26:13

Yeah.

Ryan: 00:26:13

Anyway, it's just an interesting story.

Brian: 00:26:16

It is.

Brian: 00:26:16

It's an issue of legacy.

Brian: 00:26:17

And that's the problem.

Brian: 00:26:20

We want to control things beyond ourselves.

Brian: 00:26:21

Right.

Brian: 00:26:22

We want to control things after our life.

Brian: 00:26:24

And that's just not the way it works.

Brian: 00:26:25

We can do everything that we want, but there's going to come a time where there's going to be others who come behind us and either continue what we've done or they're going to work to undo what we have done.

Ryan: 00:26:36

Well, and I just think it's so interesting.

Ryan: 00:26:38

He's sacrificing his son a Moloch, you know, like he sacrificed a molech, you know, and previously had been like David's even pleading for the life of his son.

Ryan: 00:26:47

Like, it would have been like we had this total inversion of like the value of people of a son is totally inverted here.

Brian: 00:26:57

That's a great point.

Brian: 00:26:58

So look back at verse 10.

Brian: 00:26:59

Hezekiah, the Father of Manasseh.

Brian: 00:27:01

Manasseh the father of Ammon.

Brian: 00:27:03

Ammon was no better than Manasseh.

Brian: 00:27:05

He just continued in these ways.

Brian: 00:27:06

Josiah did bring a little bit of a reform, but it was too little, too late.

Brian: 00:27:10

And then Josiah was the father of Jeconiah.

Brian: 00:27:12

Jeconiah is also called Jehoiakin.

Brian: 00:27:17

That's the last king we read about in the end of 2 Kings.

Brian: 00:27:21

We've talked about him before, that there's a little bit of hope because he's taken prisoner.

Brian: 00:27:26

Jehoiachin is taken away to be a prisoner before the Babylonians come in.

Brian: 00:27:31

But then it says Josiah, the Father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the exile to Babylon.

Brian: 00:27:37

Now, this is the next section.

Brian: 00:27:38

I want you to think about where it starts.

Brian: 00:27:40

I want you to think about the movement we've seen, the trajectory.

Brian: 00:27:43

We started with King David, the best king Israel had ever known, and peace in the land.

Brian: 00:27:50

And we end up with the people of God being ripped away from the land that God had promised them and taken away into exile because of the wickedness.

Brian: 00:27:59

What we're learning is that God's peace is ultimately not going to come about from a human ruler.

Brian: 00:28:06

The problem is, as humans, there comes an end to our reign, right?

Brian: 00:28:11

There comes an end to our life.

Brian: 00:28:13

What we need is an eternal king.

Brian: 00:28:16

We need the kind of.

Brian: 00:28:18

Not just any king.

Brian: 00:28:18

It has to be a good king, right?

Brian: 00:28:20

This has to be the kind of king that does what's right, that brings peace, that does justice.

Brian: 00:28:28

Right?

Brian: 00:28:28

That's the kind of king we want.

Brian: 00:28:30

But he's also got to be a king who will live forever, because otherwise you can have.

Brian: 00:28:36

Hezekiah is a great king, right?

Brian: 00:28:38

There are others who did good work.

Brian: 00:28:40

Uzziah did a lot to build up the military strength of Israel.

Brian: 00:28:43

But it was only a few generations until that was all gone and the Assyrians had stripped it away.

Brian: 00:28:49

And finally the Babylonians come and take over what's left.

Brian: 00:28:51

Destroy, by the way, the temple that David had conceived and that Solomon.

Brian: 00:28:57

Temple's a big deal for me.

Brian: 00:28:59

The temple that David had conceived, that Solomon had built, that God had said.

Ryan: 00:29:06

I'm putting my name on it there.

Brian: 00:29:09

And then we find Manasseh desecrating it and others desecrating it as well.

Brian: 00:29:13

But Manasseh probably worse than any others.

Brian: 00:29:16

And we find the Babylonians coming in 586 and destroying it, taking it down to the ground.

Ryan: 00:29:22

Yeah, I mean it.

Ryan: 00:29:23

I mean, for me, I'm just thinking about Antiochus Epiphanies and, like, almost the desecration.

Ryan: 00:29:28

Like it wasn't Antiochus Epiphanes was an outsider.

Ryan: 00:29:31

But you've got Manasseh, who's a king, doing the exact same thing a couple hundred years earlier, but still.

Brian: 00:29:37

Yes, exactly.

Brian: 00:29:39

And the Romans after that.

Brian: 00:29:40

So let's talk about peace.

Brian: 00:29:43

Like, we want peace, and Jesus has promised us peace.

Brian: 00:29:48

My peace I give to you.

Brian: 00:29:50

My peace I leave with you.

Brian: 00:29:50

And I don't give it like the world gives.

Brian: 00:29:52

Right.

Brian: 00:29:53

It's not a worldly kind of peace.

Brian: 00:29:54

It's a different kind of peace.

Brian: 00:29:56

Paul calls it a piece that passes understanding.

Brian: 00:29:58

It's an inside kind of peace.

Brian: 00:30:02

And so the Christ brought that.

Brian: 00:30:03

But that's not the end of the story, right?

Brian: 00:30:06

People were waiting on the coming of the peace.

Brian: 00:30:09

And I think again, Zechariah, if you think about, oh, you've come to finally defeat our enemies, even the disciples, oh, the Messiah is going to come and he's going to usher in this period of peace because he's going to get rid of the Romans, throw off these oppressors.

Brian: 00:30:23

And of course, that's not the way that Jesus taught, that's not the way he operated.

Brian: 00:30:27

But he didn't renege on his promise.

Brian: 00:30:30

He gives us peace, have that inner peace at Advent.

Brian: 00:30:35

You said get back to Advent.

Brian: 00:30:36

Here it is, at Advent, we also await his return.

Brian: 00:30:39

We also await the time that he will come again.

Brian: 00:30:43

And that peace that we have within the peace that he has given to God's people will be a peace that is for all, a universal kind of peace.

Brian: 00:30:50

We can look in the book of Revelation about anywhere you want to see this.

Brian: 00:30:54

If you want to look at Revelation 15, it says that he will be a king and all the nations.

Brian: 00:30:59

He will rule over all the nations, not just Israel, right?

Brian: 00:31:02

It's not just about, he's going to be the ruler of all the nations.

Brian: 00:31:05

All the nations are going to come to him.

Brian: 00:31:07

Revelation chapter 22.

Brian: 00:31:09

We see the river of life flowing down from the throne of God.

Brian: 00:31:12

And we see the tree of life on both sides bearing fruit 12 months a year.

Brian: 00:31:18

And the tree of life, its leaves are for the healing of the nations, right?

Brian: 00:31:24

The brokenness that we see, the wars, the rumors of wars.

Brian: 00:31:28

And I guess that's the other thing I would say is Jesus said, you know, there are going to be a lot of people who come and say, I am the Christ and don't believe them, right?

Brian: 00:31:35

There's going to be wars.

Brian: 00:31:36

There's going to be rumors of wars.

Brian: 00:31:38

As long as those are around, you know that the end has not yet come, that he's going to return.

Brian: 00:31:43

And when he returns, it's going to put an end to all of that again.

Brian: 00:31:47

Revelation 20:2.

Brian: 00:31:48

The curse will be undone, all the brokenness.

Brian: 00:31:51

And both at nations, but also in our relationships and ourselves, all that brokenness is going to be done away with.

Brian: 00:31:59

And that's what we look forward to in the Advent series.

Brian: 00:32:02

It's Advent season.

Brian: 00:32:04

In the same way that the people of old look forward to this time of peace that the Messiah was going to usher in, we look forward to that time of peace when he returns.

Brian: 00:32:15

We have, in his first Advent, his first coming.

Brian: 00:32:19

We have this idea of the peace that he can bring.

Brian: 00:32:24

But we look forward to in the second advent, that peace being made universal.

Brian: 00:32:29

You mentioned Isaiah.

Brian: 00:32:30

The lion will lay down with the lamb.

Brian: 00:32:32

Right.

Brian: 00:32:33

The little child will play and put his hands in the adder's nest.

Brian: 00:32:37

We're looking forward to that time.

Ryan: 00:32:39

Yeah.

Ryan: 00:32:40

It's a king who will not fail.

Brian: 00:32:42

Exactly.

Brian: 00:32:42

And live eternally.

Brian: 00:32:43

Eternal throne, that's the important thing.

Brian: 00:32:46

It's not going to be a peace.

Brian: 00:32:48

Well, as long as he's on the throne, everything's going to be good.

Brian: 00:32:51

But it's going to be an eternal kind of peace.

Ryan: 00:32:53

Thinking about, you got David, who was a good king but still failed.

Ryan: 00:32:56

Solomon, who started out good, failed.

Ryan: 00:32:58

You know what I mean?

Ryan: 00:32:58

Like we did the king that fails the people.

Ryan: 00:33:03

And so we eagerly anticipate the king returning who cannot and will not fail.

Brian: 00:33:09

We don't put our hope in princes, we don't put our hope in horses.

Brian: 00:33:13

We put our trust in the Lord our God.

Ryan: 00:33:16

Well, that's a good word for Advent here.

Ryan: 00:33:18

So wrapping up here, week two.

Ryan: 00:33:20

Well, Brian, thanks so much for sharing with us and we hope you all are having a great time this Christmas season, Advent season.

Ryan: 00:33:28

And we'll be back with you here two more weeks and then we're going to take a break is right before we celebrate Christmas with everyone.

Ryan: 00:33:36

So.

Ryan: 00:33:37

Yeah.

Ryan: 00:33:38

Yeah, thanks so much, Brian.

Ryan: 00:33:39

All right, chat with you next week.

Brian: 00:33:41

See you then.

Ryan: 00:33:42

Bye.